The Kashgar Regional Museum (also called the Kashgar City Museum) gives a solid background on the Silk Road history of the southern Xinjiang basin. The collection includes coins, textiles, ceramics, and manuscript fragments excavated from sites in the Tarim Basin, along with displays on the natural history of the desert and oasis environment. The quality of the archaeological finds is genuinely impressive — the dry desert conditions have preserved organic materials that would not have survived elsewhere.
The museum is worth an hour, especially for visitors who plan to continue along the Southern Silk Road toward Hotan or up the Karakoram Highway toward Pakistan. The context it provides makes the landscape and the remaining ruins far more readable. The labels are in Chinese and Uyghur, with limited English.